[staticshock]

They were taught not to read errors because they encountered thousands of errors (in other software) that were less helpful than that one.

Most people have an adversarial relationship with software: it is just the pile of broken glass they have to crawl through on the way to getting their task done. This understanding is reinforced and becomes more entrenched with each next paper cut.

[hermitcrab]

I guess it is a mindset thing. Techies see something like this as a problem to solve. Non-techies often panic at the slightest variance from what they were expecting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness